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Starting your blogging journey can feel overwhelming. Between the overflow of advice being bandied about and the pressure you put on yourself to make your blog “perfect” you may be paralyzed by fear.

Take one deep breath.

Relax.

Start your blogging journey off on the right foot. Follow your fun to begin blogging from the proper space.

1: Follow Your Fun

Blog your fun. Follow your fun.

All the practical tips below aren’t worth a hill of beans if you don’t blog your fun.

Pick a niche you feel passionate about. Passion fuels your blogging journey through ups and downs. Being passionate makes the work/play the reward. This detaches you a bit from outcomes which inspires you to create, connect, to serve others, to have fun and to do all the things you need to do to succeed with your blog.

Don’t make the common mistake of using a free blogging platform. Do you really think folks will follow you with your jacked-up looking domain name?

Plunk down money. Buy your domain. Buy hosting. Build a professional brand. From day one.

3: Follow 1-3 Blogging Mentors

Follow one to three blogging mentors. Learn from successful bloggers. Do as they do.

If you’re new to blogging you may feel lost or outright overwhelmed, like an ant trying to fight off the stream from a firehose.Successful pro bloggers from your niche teach you how to be and what to do to succeed.

Losing your way as a newbie is part and parcel with your online tuition. Pros nudge you back on track.

Read pro blogs. Buy their courses. Hire them. Let them lead you to success.

Smart bloggers follow the advice of professional, established bloggers from day one of their blogging careers.

4: Write 500 Words Daily for Practice

Write 500 words daily in a Word document. Trash the doc. This is just writing practice.

Following this practice gives you confidence and clarity in your writing. Doing so helps you find your writing voice.

This is the #1 practical tip to follow for any new blogger. Once you can write, everything else begins to fall into place nicely.

5: Promote Other Bloggers

This seems zany to new bloggers who are caught up on themselves.

This seems like common knowledge to successful bloggers.

Your blogging journey gets easier if you bring 10, 100 or 1000 people on board. Imagine 100 folks promoting you to their networks? Imagine how you’d inspired 100 folks to promote you? By promoting them. By befriending them.

Make friends with bloggers from your niche. Comment on their blogs. Help them. Assist them. Tweet their posts.

Some bloggers will promote you in return. Friendships form. You just cut your learning curve by years.

Hands down, most bloggers struggle like an earthworm on a piping hot sidewalk because they go Lone Wolf. Join the pack. Make friends. The whole “strength in numbers” deal.

6: Double Down on Personal Development

A jambalaya of limiting beliefs *will* pop up on your blogging journey.

Double down on meditating, exercising and clearing your inner world to face, embrace and release limiting beliefs.

I meditate for 30 minutes daily. I also exercise for 60 minutes every day.

Doing the inner work and raising your vibe helps you navigate the inevitable obstacles that will pop up along the way, smoothing out a sometimes bumpy new blogger path.

7: Dive into Blog Commenting

Blog commenting is the easiest, simplest way for new bloggers to gain traction.

This networking method involves few barriers to entry. Outside of having your comment sit in a spam folder for a few hours your creation goes live quickly.

For years I’ve changed the look and feel of this site every now and again. I love each and every new theme I have put on here. I’ve used thesis themes, wordpress org themes, studiopress themes and probably a few other ones as well.

If there is one thing I know for certain it is that every time you change your layout the blog takes on a whole new feel. You tend to write differently approach your articles differently and so forth….

Making Your Blog Comments Effective For Marketing

I check my analytic s all the time. It always amazes me how much traffic I can pull from commenting on other peoples blogs. With all the animal updates google likes to give us. Many bloggers have been more cautious with blog comments.

I can’t blame them I literally get thousands of spam comments every month. I also get lots of those weird comments, you know the ones they kinda go like this:

“Great idea, thanks for the tip I am going to have to use that, I learned so much thank you”

Let’s be honest here:

First nobody is going to care about your blog comments unless you engage the writer or engage another comment with a meaningful opinion. Seriously you don’t have to agree with me to get your comment on my blog. You simply need to actually read what I write or read what someone else commented and take part in the conversation.

Blog Comments don’t = Higher Search Engine Rankings

Maybe blog comments do increase your search engine rankings. But if that is the case your comments needs to be on blogs that are within the same niche that you are in to get any meaningful link juice.

SEO isn’t the power of a blog comment. The magic is in the comment itself. You need to really step back and look at the other commentors and also take in the bloggers blog.

The better you can grab a persons attention with your statement the more people that will visit you. I see it all the time on my own stuff. I drop a comment somewhere and keep getting traffic from that comment for months.

The reason is because I don’t write crappy comments. I write thoughtful, insightful and sometimes heart felt comments. The type of comments that compels a person to click on my name.

I know I am going to get some people biting my head off for saying this but I think it needs to be said. Blog comments are only good for your business if they can actually get you traffic.

Get out of your mind that you need lots of backlinks to make money or get more traffic because it’s simply not true. What you need is content that people want. The rest will happen on it’s own.

Blog Comments Is The Doorway Into Another Traffic Stream

Realize that the webmaster of whatever blog you are visiting works very hard to keep traffic coming to their site. If you do your part engage the author, write good comments that are keyword rich then you will be rewarded with more traffic.

If you are low on advertising budget and you want to drive more traffic to your stuff here are some do and don’ts when using blog comments for you

Don’t use landing pages in your url’s I don’t know any bloggers that like to link to other peoples landing pages

1&1 Hosting And Other Tid Bits

I’ve read the good the bad and the ugly about 1 & 1 hosting. I don’t have an opinion on the matter other than I’ve been hosting with them since around 2006. In that time I have experienced all kinds of problems.

Their customers service is okay but I do have some cripes about it and maybe I can help you solve some of your 1&1 hosting problems.

WordPress, SSL, 1&1 Hosting

So I have another blog 🙂 that uses SSL. Of course I had to figure out how to the SSL certificate to work with my site.

I called up 1&1 hosting support and they gave me zero support.

They told me to ask my developer how to do it.

I explained to them I was the developer of my site and not a very good one at that. Long story short I purchased my SSL certificate from geotrust through 1&1 and was installed on my server. I still know how to get it to work with my site.

So You Know What Online Niche Business You Want To Start Now What?

Let me guess, you are waking up in the middle of the night excited about your new online niche business. The only problem is where do you start? In this blog post we are going to discuss some of the steps you should take when getting ready to start your new online business.

I admit it, when I first started marketing on the internet I didn’t really have the first idea how important branding was. Your brand represents you. Some of you may be tempted to go to fivver and pay someone to create a cheap logo for you and call it day.

As I just said, your brand represents you. If you care about what you are doing you will take the time to get a good logo that fits your vision perfectly. When you are thinking about getting involved with a online niche business you want your brand logo to represent you and what you are doing. Again I want to stress that first impressions go along way. One of the first things your potential customer/subscriber/follower will notice is your logo. [Read more…] about Core Components When Starting Your Online Niche Business

First It Was 100% Commissions!

Isn’t it funny that almost everywhere you look now you can find a program that is offering a 100% commissions. The funny part is right before Empower Network hit the market nobody was willing to offer that to their affiliates. In short they where all greedy bastards not wanting YOU to make a good profit.

I heard whispers that Empower networks blogging platform is nothing more than a wordpress blog. While it is a wordpress blog, the extra coding made getting seo rankings a bit easy. However I wasn’t the only one hearing the peoples cry. I suspected that Empower Network was doing something that would totally revolutionize the way blogging is done. I heard the whispers and snickers.

Switching WordPress Themes

So I thought it was time for a new wordpress theme. I have had my eye on the one your looking at now for some time now. I have been hesitant to switch because of the headache it is to redesign these things…

WordPress Basics – A Dashboard Comparison

In case it isn’t obvious 🙂 I am a big fan of Empower Network. I am also a big fan of WordPress and blogging in general. Maybe it’s because before I blogged I spent thousands of dollars trying to sell stuff unsuccessfully. It wasn’t until I started blogging did I actually start making an income that I could actually be proud of making.